Basic skills

These are basic skill recommendations. None of these skills have prerequisites above level III, and are thus easily accessible to new players. They will provide a solid foundation upon which to develop more advanced skills and fit more advanced modules.

The list has been grouped to match the in-game Skill categories. Some of the skills below are useful in your early days only to use some basic modules; others will increase your ship's performance directly and should be trained up to level II or III relatively fast. Where applicable which races of ship commonly benefit from a skill are included in parenthesis, but understand that the racial bonuses of a ship are not always a limiting factor of advanced player choices.

Take a look at the skill descriptions to see how they would help you, but understand that the description text does not always reveal the variety of useful skills and modules it unlocks as you train higher. Try using an application like EVE Fitting Tool that lets you see how a ship's attributes are affected by skills. EveMon is another popular program that will let you plan skill training for your character. These and other useful programs and websites are linked in the 3rd Party Tools article.

Rigging

Jury Rigging : Allows makeshift modifications to ship systems through the use of rigs. Required learning for further study in the field of rigging.

Rigging skills are no longer necessary to train to install rigs, however they are important to reduce the various drawback penalties that rigs cause. Level III of this skill is the gateway to training the remainder of the skillbooks.

Trade : Active buy/sell order limit increased by 4 per level of skill.

Recommended basic skillplans

Here you will find some compiled skill plans from the basic skills listed above. The idea is to provide a good starting point for new players who are interested in PvP or general combat. In order to use these skillplans you need to download the associated zip-file, extract the plans from those files (using 7zip or similar) and then import the skillplan into EVEmon.
Also keep in mind that the Eve University Skillbook Program provides most of these skills for free.

NB: The skill lists for both skillplans have been updated to reflect the changes in Kronos (June 2014), but the associated downloads have not.

Minimum recommended skillplan

In this plan you will find alot of different skills, ranging from shield and armor tanks, active and passive, to e-war skills, gunnery and missile skills, navigation skills ect. The idea is to provide all skills you need in order to be able to fly ALL races frigates somewhat effectively. Any character will have some of the skills included in this trained already, but there is a good chance that you're missing at least a few of them. So you could just import this plan into EVEmon and see what you are missing. Also, if you want to, you could of course ignore specific skills (if you plan on only flying armor tanked ships you could ignore the shield skills for example).
Once you trained all skills in this plan you should be able to fly all T1 frigates in all roles quite well. At that point you can try out different things, see if you find something you really like to do and then focus on that.

Advanced recommended skillplan

In this plan you will find all the skills that are in the minimum plan, but most of them trained to a higher level and also some additional skills that are not in the minimum skillplan at all. The idea for this plan is to provide a solid skillset to be able to fly all races T1 frigates very efficiently, though not yet maxed out. Training all these skills will take a much longer time but will provide a very good base from which you can move on into bigger and/or more specialized ships.

EFT characters

If you want to you can download these characters and import them into EFT. These characters will have all the skills of their associated skillplans as listed above. You could use these to see how training these skills would affect any ship setup you might have in EFT and also you can easily compare the effects of training up from the minimum plan to the advanced plan.